Why the games industry has less to fear than the music & TV industries, in moving online

I was intrigued by the title of this article - skeptical of gaming following other media online.  But I think it doesn’t follow that because the TV & Music industries have done so badly that gaming will struggle to find their feet too.

The reason gaming will work in a move online is that it’s gaming developers themselves doing it, the creative is moving online.  With TV and music big intermediaries sat between the creative and the consumer.  This made them slower to respond, more brittle.  They broke.  They were too slow to respond to customer demand and ended up losing control of the consumer (in music’s case to either piracy or Apple).

What's the future for digital content, creators and media companies? Part 1

“If your content cannot command more attention than it takes to consume that content, then your content has no economic value.”

I don’t think that’s a particularly aggressive statement, though some will think it such.  I think it’s a statement of self-evident facts.

For now, I am going to use a few catch-all terms and try to be consistent.  I am going to use the word “content” as a placeholder for music, movies, tv, articles… the work of content “creators”.  I’ll use “creators” as shorthand for artists, writers, filmmakers, those who are the source of content.  Finally I am going to talk about “consumers” of the content, as a general term rather than more specific words like customers, readers etc.  I am also going to try to avoid terms from economics, like marginal utility and the like, because the purpose of this series of posts isn’t to be an essay on economics, it’s trying to establish in a practical sense where the industry is going - and more importantly, because I am not an economist.

Price Discovery ...in acting

A simple principle that is surprisingly poorly understood by the public at large is the basic concept of Price Discovery.

It’s a favourite lens of mine when it comes to viewing trends and understanding what’s going on in markets undergoing disruption.  It’s not always clear that Price Discovery is the dynamic in play, but not considering it is a mistake as it leads to what I call “the frustration of unexplained events” - where those affected by change are unable to detect the pattern of cause and effect with regards to that change, and therefore feel powerless, frustrated, angry.

I heard an actor on NPR bleating about how terrible the industry is today, as just a few years ago bit-part, middle-of-the-road guest stars on everyday TV shows could make incomes of $600-700k per yearr but now make just a fraction of that nowadays.